Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Man wants but little, nor that little long; How soon must he resign his very dust, Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

I've had a lot of people pass away in my life. I guess it's all a matter of how you deal with your mortality - and recognizing that you are mortal. I'm trying to see what a gift life is and how quickly it can be extinguished, without any warning.

Remember that life is short and death is long.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle / Then to dwindle day by day / Knowing their bright souls are tinder / And the wind will have its way

Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

Does it matter how long they were together that night? To lovers, an hour can last a century. But even for lovers, every hour ends.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

Just as a line drawn on water with a stick will quickly vanish and will not last long; even so, brahmins, is human life like a line drawn on water. It is short, limited, and brief; it is full of suffering. One should do good and live a pure life; for none who is born can escape death.

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

Human life is but of brief duration. 'All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God shall stand forever' (Isa. 40:6, 8). Let us hold fast to the commandment that abides, and despise the unreality that passes away.

O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!